Sartre, Kafka, Welles

“I’m The Jewish Question, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Delighted to meet you.” Yvonne Blake (who was also the assist­ant art dir­ect­or on the film) in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, 1966

In October of 1944, a few months after the lib­er­a­tion of France, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote short book called Réflexions sur la Question Juive. Its first English trans­la­tions were titled The Jewish Question—it is one of the liv­ing books that announce them­selves at the end of Truffaut’s 1966 adapt­a­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The cur­rently avail­able English trans­la­tion has been retitled Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.

Like much of Sartre, this work is notice­ably imper­fect, but what flashes of geni­us it con­tains are bril­liant indeed, and remain per­tin­ent. One pas­sage that struck me is this: “Today these Jews whom the Germans did not deport or murder are com­ing back to their homes. Many were among the first mem­bers of the Resistance; oth­ers had sons or cous­ins in Leclerc’s army. Now all France rejoices and frat­ern­izes in the streets; social con­flict seems tem­por­ar­ily for­got­ten; the news­pa­pers devote whole columns to stor­ies of pris­on­ers of war and deportees. Do we say any­thing about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas cham­bers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the news­pa­pers. That is because we must not irrit­ate the anti-Semites; more than ever we need unity. Well-meaning journ­al­ists will tell you: ‘In the interest of the Jews them­selves, it would not do to talk too much about them just now.’ For four years French soci­ety has lived without them; it is just as well not to emphas­ize too vig­or­ously the fact that they have reappeared.”

As I said, Sartre wrote this in October of 1944. At that point in time Lublin was the only death camp the Allies had found. By the time Orson Welles began work on The Stranger, in the fall of 1945, the oth­er camps had become known to the world. Welles had been cast in the film in the role of Hans Kindler, a flee­ing Nazi war crim­in­al (by the movie’s lights, a kind of wun­der­kind of gen­o­cide, a slightly iron­ic pos­i­tion in which to place Welles in a Hollywood pic­ture) and was even­tu­ally per­suaded to dir­ect it as well. In the second volume of his pro­tean Welles bio­graphy, Simon Callow writes “[t]he degree of [Welles’] input into the script has nev­er been clearly determ­ined, though it seems almost cer­tain that he must have been respons­ible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler ana­lyzes the nature of the Nazi quest, so famil­i­ar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’ own speeches, art­icles and columns.” “Rankin” is the ali­as Kindler has taken in America; anoth­er way this true believ­er goes under­cov­er is to pre­tend to be not just thor­oughly anti-Nazi, but anti-German. One of his speeches occurs at a din­ner scene; Edward G. Robinson’s secret agent, pos­ing as an antiques maven, is din­ing with Rankin/Kindler, Kindler’s new bride, played by Loretta Young, and her fath­er and teen broth­er. The scene has many pleas­ures, one of them being Loretta Young pro­noun­cing the word “Carthaginian,” it is most not­able for the way the real Kindler reveals him­self to Robinson’s char­ac­ter. Growing increas­ingly heated in anti-Teutonic fer­vor (and Callow is right; the words and the way Welles pro­nounces them are kind of like an inver­ted, zeal­ous vari­ant of Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man), Kindler says: “The basic prin­ciples of equal­ity and free­dom nev­er have and nev­er will take root in Germany. The will to free­dom has been voiced in every oth­er tongue. ‘All men are cre­ated equal,’ ‘Liberté egal­ité fra­tern­ité,’ but, in German…”

Kindler’s eager young brother-in-law, played by a very appeal­ing Richard Long, butts in:

“There’s Marx. The pro­let­ari­ans unite, you have noth­ing to lose but your chains…”

“But Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew,” Kindler responds, almost instant­an­eously, calm but def­in­ite. This dif­fer­en­ti­ation is what gives away Kindler to Robinson’s char­ac­ter. It is also a stag­ger­ing dra­mat­ic mani­fest­a­tion of anti-Semitic thought, which Sartre dis­sects with incred­ible vig­or in his own book: You’re not THIS, you are THAT, a Jew.

Elsewhere in Sartre, he writes, of the frus­tra­tions the Jew exper­i­ences in French soci­ety: “…it seems to him at one and the same time that his efforts are always crowned with success—for he knows the aston­ish­ing suc­cesses of his race—and that a curse has made them empty, for he will nev­er acquire the secur­ity enjoyed by the most humble Christian.” Sartre con­tin­ues; “This is per­haps one of the mean­ings of The Trial by the Jew, Kafka. Like the hero of that nov­el, the Jew is engaged in a long tri­al. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his law­yers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is con­sidered guilty; judg­ment is con­tinu­ally put off—for a week, two weeks—he takes advant­age of these to prove his pos­i­tion in a thou­sand ways, but every pre­cau­tion taken at ran­dom pushes him a little deep­er into guilt. His extern­al situ­ation may appear bril­liant, but the inter­min­able tri­al invis­ibly wastes him away, and it hap­pens some­times, as in the nov­el, that men seize him, carry him off on the pre­tense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs.”

Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Max Haufler in The Trial, Welles, 1963

Orson Welles made a film of Kafka’s The Trial in the early ‘60s. Like The Stranger, it was not a pro­ject of his own con­cep­tion. The pic­ture was brought to him by the pro­du­cer Alexander Salkind, and while the pro­ject was plagued by intense money prob­lems it turned out to be one of the very few pro­duc­tions up until that point on which Welles enjoyed com­plete artist­ic autonomy right down to the release cut. Setting the story in a stark, black-and-white, com­pletely commerce-and-media-free ver­sion of then-contemporary Europe, Welles dera­cin­ates the story in par­tic­u­lar by cast­ing Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. I have not been able to dig up any­thing in my Welles lib­rary to sug­gest that Welles loc­ated a par­tic­u­lar kind of oth­er­ness in Perkins’ being a thor­oughly closeted gay man. Callow addresses the situ­ation thusly: “Perkins’ performance—inherently neur­ot­ic, though not not­ably anxious—does indeed sug­gest a man with a secret (not much act­ing called for there).” Perkins’ all-American mode of nervous­ness sug­gests Edgar Allan Poe more than Kafka and of course it also sug­gests Alfred Hitchcock. One thing it nev­er sug­gests is Jewishness.

And yet Welles, in inter­views years after mak­ing the film, dis­cusses The Trial in terms of Kafka’s Jewishness. In an inter­view with Peter Bogdanovich, explain­ing why he tampered with the end­ing of the book, Welles extra­pol­ates: “In the end of the book he lies down there and they kill him. I don’t think Kafka could have stood for that after the deaths of six mil­lion Jews. That ter­rible fact occurred after the writ­ing of The Trial and I think it made Kafka’s end­ing impossible. If you con­ceive of K as a Jew, as I did. I don’t mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it mor­ally impossible for me to see a man who might even pos­sibly be taken by the audi­ence for a Jew lying down and allow­ing him­self to be killed that way.”

Is that true? We have no way of know­ing. People on social media today fre­quently cite a quote from Kafka about there being an infin­ite amount of hope—but not for us. The quote’s source is a state­ment he made to his friend and bio­graph­er Max Brod, trans­lated in 1947 as “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—but not for us.” More reli­able, per­haps, is the aph­or­ism: “In the struggle between your­self and the world, back the world.” Welles’ argu­ment with Kafka is summed up by Callow thusly: “man is guilty but man­kind is not doomed.” Welles’ con­fu­sion con­cern­ing Kafka has theo­lo­gic­al roots, as well: “K is not meta­phys­ic­ally guilty at birth as con­ceived by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian,” he said to Bogdanovich.

Sartre insists: “The dis­quiet­ude of the Jew is not meta­phys­ic­al, it is social.” In Welles’ film, the anxi­ety is not social as such, it’s free-floating, often hov­er­ing between the stools of the meta­phys­ic­al and the erot­ic, as Perkins’ Josef K is befuddled in turn by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. Andrew Sarris called The Trial “the most hate­ful, the most repel­lent, and the most per­ver­ted film ever made,” but the movie’s par­tic­u­lar feel comes from Welles’ spe­cific­ally American form of optim­ism abrad­ing Kafka’s pess­im­ism. Which, as Sartre teaches us, was far less abstract than we some­times like to make it. And as visu­ally beau­ti­ful and thrill­ing and unset­tling as Welles’ movie is, one con­stantly senses that it is a work that is tor­tu­ously uncer­tain of what it wants to mean. This is nev­er in doubt, I think, when read­ing Kafka.

In the pro­logue to the film prop­er, Welles observes of Kafka’s nov­el: “It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Of a night­mare.” Welles’ film is best seen as the filmmaker’s own dream/nightmare of Kafka. While I would not go so far as to say that a work of art palp­ably changes with the times, the times com­pel us to see works of art dif­fer­ently. Today’s cir­cum­stance does not com­pel a new read­ing of Welles’ Trial, but it does demand that we adopt Sartre’s read­ing of Kafka.